America's Best College Buys

For many students, the price of a school is as important a factor in deciding where to go as its quality. Knowing where you can get the most quality for each tuition dollar spent helps for those shopping on a budget. That is the goal of this year's Best Buy Ranking. To produce the ranking, we divided each school's overall quality score by its average net (after allowance for scholarship grants) tuition rate from the 2003-2004 to 2006-2007 academic years.

The quality score is calculated by summing each school's score with respect to Who's Who in America citations, salary data from PayScale.com, course evaluations from RateMyProfessor.com, the receipt of student and faculty nationally competitive awards, and the graduation rate variables used in the Best College rankings. (For more detail, please see our complete methodology.) All schools with an actual four-year graduation rate lower than 25% are excluded from the "Best Buy Ranking." We believe that to be considered a "high value" investment there must be a reasonable expectation of completing one's degree within the normal time period. (For more on why college costs so much and how universities spend their money, see Forbes magazine stories Economics 101" and Bureaucrat U.)